Acts 8:3 As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison. They say that martyrdoms are ended. It is true that the stake is abandoned; Bloody Mary is dead; Smithfield is a commonplace sheep-market, with only an inscription on one side of it to record the fidelity of John Rogers. And perhaps it is not necessary to force the rhetoric which calls Abraham Lincoln the "martyr president," or to assert beyond strict accuracy that an assassin could make President Garfield a martyr by shooting him. We need not plant ourselves upon a plane so high or so tragic as this. There are small martyrdoms for Christ's sake which in ordinary life are quite within the reach of our attainment. It is a very plain truth that we find in the line of the German poet, Heinrich Heine: "Wheresoever a great thought is born, there always has been a Golgotha." When any genuine man is called into conspicuousness, and forced to take a stand for an unpopular or advanced principle against obloquy and opposition, there will be persecution as common as "the common prison" into which the apostles were hurried after they preached the resurrection. (C. S. Robinson, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: As for Saul, he made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison. |
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